New ExpressRoute locations and partners

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re lighting up six new ExpressRoute locations in US and Asia, as well as forming new partnerships with Orange and IIJ. With these new locations and new partnerships, more customers will now be able to access Azure via ExpressRoute.

New Locations

When we announced general availability of ExpressRoute on May 12th, 2014, the service was made available to customers in the US and Europe via three locations - Silicon Valley, CA; Washington D.C. and London, UK. As you may recall, ExpressRoute locations are facilities where ExpressRoute connections are available to Azure datacenters. Today, we’re adding 7 more locations to this list.

US: Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, New York and Seattle

Asia: Hong Kong, Singapore

With today’s announcement, we now have 10 ExpressRoute locations across US, Europe and Asia. The tables below provides a list of ExpressRoute locations and partner offerings in each of the locations.

Asia

Connectivity through NSPs

If you have a relationship with any of the NSPs in the list above, they will be able to route you from your premises to Azure through the locations listed above. Pick a location closes to the Azure region where you plan to host most of your services in.

Connectivity through other service providers

If your network service provider is not in the list above, you can still get connected to Azure.

Check with your NSP to see if they are present in any of the Exchange locations listed above.

Have the NSP extend your network to the Exchange location of choice.

Order an ExpressRoute circuit through the Exchange provider to connect to Azure.

You can read my ExpressRoute overview blog post to understand the differences between Network Service Providers and Exchange Providers.

New Partners

We are excited to announce new strategic relationships with Orange Business Services. With this partnership, our mutual customers in Europe will be able to connect to Azure ExpressRoute through Orange Business VPN Galerie service. Business VPN Galerie service is Orange integrated WAN-to-Cloud solution offering a private access to the Microsoft Azure platform without having to deploy a dedicated infrastructure. We are also excited to announce new strategic relationships with Internet Initiative Japan (IIJ). With these partnership, our mutual customers in Japan will be able to use ExpressRoute to reach Azure. In the coming months, we will be able to onboard early adopter customers for these partners. Please reach out to us through your Microsoft account team / sales contact if you are interested in signing up. We’re also pleased to share that British Telecom’s ExpressRoute offering has now gone live in Europe. ExpressRoute documentation:https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/expressroute/